Darya had a sudden memory, a flashback to the surface of Iceworld. Lara Quistner, standing, screaming, crumbling from the feet up as implacable cold ascended her body . . .
“Humans,” she began.
“And not only humans.” Graves’s skeletal face was somber, and his misty blue eyes stared at some distant vision. “The evidence was there, even before we left Miranda. We remarked on the condition of the bodies of the Marglotta, and of the Chism Polypheme. How had they died? They were apparently unharmed. But at the microscopic level, cells were ruptured everywhere throughout their bodies. As they would burst, were they instantly and completely frozen. A small group of Marglotta sought to fly far from danger, and to seek help. But by the time they left Marglot it was already too late. The Masters of Cold, or more likely some non-corporeal servant form, were already on board that ship. When it reached Miranda, those cold forms had vanished without trace. But you were right, Professor Lang, and I was wrong. Another force is present in the galaxy, a force as powerful as the Builders themselves. The Masters of Cold are not builders; they are indeed destroyers.”
He added to Nenda, “Now it is more than ever vital that we escape from here, and carry this news back to our own Orion Arm. Meanwhile, I will seek to determine the current location of the beetlebacks. They pose an increasing threat.”
Graves swept out, accompanied by Tally, Darya Lang, and Sinara Bellstock. Louis was left staring at just Hans Rebka.
“What’s he think we’re doing? Sittin’ on our butts laughin’ an’ scratchin’?”
“He’s an ethicist, Darya is a theorist, Tally is a calculator, and Sinara is a trainee. This thing is up to you and me, Nenda—or would you rather rely on the rest of them?”
“Don’t try to scare me. I’m scared enough already. Got ideas?”
“You say we can fly atmospheric. Suppose we do that, get as high and as fast as we can, and then turn on the Have-It-All’s space drive. Might that do it?”
“Thought of that a long time ago, an’ Kallik checked it out. We won’t make it to space unless our mass is way down.”
“You trust Kallik’s answer?”
“Hell, no. Anybody can be wrong, even Kallik. But Atvar H’sial and E.C. Tally came up with the same result. We can get off the ground, but not off the planet. The jury is still out on how well we’d do with the ship stripped to the bare bones.”
“Suppose you were to fly atmospheric to the top speed you can reach, then dump those engines and switch to orbital thrustors.”
“It’s easy to see it’s my ship you’re tearin’ to bits, an’ not yours. But I looked at that, too. You can’t dismantle and dump the atmospheric engines without a crew outside the ship. If you want to be unscrewin’ nuts and bolts an’ strippin’ off engines while you’re hangin’ on the outside at Mach Two, be my guest. I put your chances of stayin’ there more than twenty seconds at one in a million.”
“You thought of it already.”
“I did. But keep comin’ up with them ideas. I just said anyone can be wrong, an’ I’m sure in the group.”
“A tight spot.”
“Damn right.” Nenda studied Hans Rebka’s face. “You know the difference between you an’ me?”
“You’re a crook, and I’m not?”
“Don’t be a smartass. The big difference is, we both know we’re in deep trouble, an’ I hate it. But you get off on it. Come on, admit it.”
“I was raised for trouble, Nenda. I was born on Teufel.”
“Yeah, yeah. ‘What sins must a man commit,’ an’ all that stuff. I’ve heard it before, I don’t need to hear it again. Question is, what do we do now?”
“We finish the inventory of the Have-It-All. We strip out everything we can do without. Then we strip out some things we believe we can’t do without. Then we fly. And if we still have too much mass, I know a way to reduce it some more. You and I flip a coin, and the loser jumps overboard.”
“Sounds fair to me.”
“You have a two-headed coin, right?”
“How’d you guess.” Nenda walked over to the port and stared out at Marglot’s barren but beautiful landscape. “Fifty-five below. Think that Ben Blesh is somewhere out there?”
“If he is, he’d better be under cover. It’s blowing up another storm.”
“We better not stay too long on the surface ourselves, or we’ll be here forever.”
“I’ll offer you a better deal than the last one. If we’re too heavy when the time comes, I’ll go outside and take my chances with Ben Blesh. If we’re not too heavy and we do make it out alive, you’ll owe me one. We’ll go back together to the Phemus Circle and try to overthrow the government.”
“You crazy? You’ve got me confused with a guy who cares about other people. I’ll stick with the coin toss. Come on.” Nenda led the way from the room. “Let’s see what else may have to be chucked out of here, an’ break my sorrowin’ heart.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Iceworld again
One of Ben Blesh’s survival trainers had offered a warning: Be extra careful if you are ever forced to operate when sick or injured, because in such circumstances your senses provide a distorted view of reality. A familiar setting may seem to change beyond recognition.
Sound advice, but the converse situation had not been addressed. Suppose that you returned to a place you had only seen before when in shock and in pain?
Ben looked around, and felt certain that this setting was new to him. He had few clear memories of the interior of Iceworld, but surely he had never been in any place remotely like this.
He stared the length of the great chamber in which he stood, then looked side to side and at last overhead. He realized in that moment that he was wrong. He was standing at the base of a gigantic horizontal cylinder, hundreds of meters long and broad in proportion. The sides, studded with “light fixtures” from which no light emerged, curved away and up to meet far above his head. Suspended from that distant ceiling hung a familiar shape: a medusa’s head of tubes, wires, and tentacles, all grossly enlarged. He was standing within a robodoc, exactly like the one on the Have-It-All. Either it was expanded hundreds of times, or Ben had been reduced to the size of a fly. In his mind, the robodoc stood as a symbol of healing and security. How could anything else in the universe know that?
But this confirmed his conviction that he had never been here before. It also increased his confusion as to what to do next. When Hans Rebka had been in charge and Ben was injured, all decisions had been made for him. Now he had to act for himself.
His suit sensors showed reduced pressure and an unbreathable atmosphere, but as he watched it climbed to a density and composition that he could live with. Apparently something knew he was here—wherever “here” might be—and it did not intend to kill him.
He opened his faceplate and began to walk along the floor of the giant cylinder. It was probably wasted effort, since anything that knew he was here could presumably find him no matter where he went. The walk was for his benefit alone. He needed to do something, after that interminable wait in the snow when he had wondered if he would ever move again.
His first impression of the cylinder had been that it went on forever, but as he walked he could see that he was approaching a place where everything—floor, walls, ceiling—abruptly ended. He walked on, to the point where one more step would take him into space, and looked down. An endless sea of gray lay below, without any reference point to provide a sense of scale. For all he knew, the fog might be one meter from his feet, or a thousand kilometers. The cylinder hovered over a void of indeterminate extent.
Ben could take that final step out over the edge and see what happened. All his survival training—which admittedly had so far been of no use whatsoever—argued against it. He turned, intending to walk back the length of the cylinder.
Lara Quistner stood waiting, maybe thirty meters away. She was wearing her suit, as he had last seen her in life. An equal distance behind her was an identica
l Lara, with another behind that. A whole line of Laras waited on the central axis of the cylinder, diminishing away into the distance.
Ben would accept the reality of the cylinder. He had little choice, since he was standing on it. Lara, or an infinite line of Laras, was another matter. They must be the products of his imagination.
He walked forward to the nearest waiting figure, reached out, and touched his gloved hand to her faceplate. The shape in front of him rippled and started to change. At the same time, the long line of image figures moved in rapidly to coalesce with the first one. The surface he had touched brightened. In less than a minute Ben stood before a shining spherical body. As the last ripples died away on the silver surface, a slender neck with a pentagonal head emerged from the topmost part.
Ben drew in his first deep breath since leaving the surface of Marglot. If every journey began with a single step, he had just completed a second one. Now to try for a third. Was the object in front of him Guardian of Travel, or would he have to start everything over from the beginning?
“Can you hear and understand what I am saying?”
The initial reaction was not encouraging. The silver globe sank into the surface of the cylinder, until only a small upper part was visible.
“I have returned from the world to which you sent us. You said that we might return.”
The long-necked sphere remained silent, but it slowly began to reemerge from the floor. That had to count as progress of sorts.
“I would like to learn more about the planet to which you sent us.”
“A special world.”
At last, words.
“Did you say that a super-vortex lies at the center of that world?” This would be one hell of a time for Ben to learn that in his shocked and injured condition he had dreamed up the whole previous conversation.
“A super-vortex exists at the center. That is correct.”
“Is it a transport vortex?”
“No. There is no way that it can be used as such. It was placed there long, long ago by our creator, to serve a quite different purpose.”
“Will it work now, as it did then?”
“We do not know.”
Not so good. “If it can still work, is it controlled at the planet I just came from?”
“It is controlled from here, and only from here.”
Fifty-fifty on the answers he hoped for. As good as it was likely to get. But the difficult part lay ahead. Guardian of Travel seemed friendly enough to humans, but all its allegiance must lie with the Builders. Also, its sentience was inorganic and presumably completely logical. You had to imagine that you were trying to persuade E.C. Tally—and hope you remembered at least some of the facts correctly from the last time you were here.
“As servant to the Builders you once provided access to many worlds, including the surface of this one. Little by little, the service that you provide was diminished; not because the Builders wished it so, but because another group has been at work, destroying what the Builders made. Now you have access to only one world.”
“One world; but a special world to the Builders.”
“Special, but not special enough to save it. Unless you take action, that last world will suffer the same fate as all the others.” This was the trickiest piece of what Ben had to say. From most points of view Marglot was already a dead world. “That world is not yet in the hands of the Builder adversaries. It can perhaps be saved from possession by them, if you take the right action here.”
“If it can be saved by such action on our part, do you wish to return to it?”
That was a question to which Ben had given not one moment’s thought. Go back? It was his turn to say, “I do not know. Why do you ask?”
“Because connection to the super-vortex at the heart of the world can be made at any time, while use of a transport vortex to the surface is possible only at precise times, when the configuration of other events permits it.”
Die here of eventual starvation and dehydration? Or return to die on Marglot, in whatever strange condition that planet might be at the time of his transfer?
“May I postpone a decision on that?” Ben felt a paradoxical sense of exhilaration. Sure, he was going to die. But he had taken another step toward his goal, and he would keep stepping as long as he had breath. “Let me tell you what must be done to save the world from possession by the adversaries of the Builders.”
“We will listen.” The pentagonal disk bobbed up and down on its long silver neck. “Be aware, however, that we too may postpone a decision.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Escape clause
“It has happened before, if you are willing to believe some of the ancient stories.” Teri Dahl’s arms felt ready to fall off and she was taking a brief break. “An old man pushed a rock up a hill all day. Whenever he reached the top it rolled back down and he had to start over.”
Torran Veck had been digging furiously, clearing away new snow and old ice from the runway in front of the Have-It-All. He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what they meant by an old man, but I doubt if he was much older than I’m feeling. We’ve done this three times so far. How many more?”
“As often as we need, until we can get out of here. I heard Louis Nenda talking with Hans Rebka. No one, not even E.C. Tally, can calculate the weather patterns. At least the temperature seems to be holding steady. Nenda says we just have to keep the thrustors free from snow and ice as often as they become clogged, and hold the runway open.”
“That’s easy for him to say. He’s not down here digging.”
“In some ways this is harder on Nenda than anyone else. It’s his ship that’s being torn to pieces and thrown away. Look at that.”
A flash of green showed at one of the upper hatches, and four storage lockers came sailing out to land on the snow.
Torran stared up. “That’s Claudius at the hatch. If they have him working, things must really be bad.”
“Nenda let him sit inside the shields on the forward reactor for a few hours, and it made all the difference. See how light a green he is? He’s drunk. In his condition he’s likely to throw himself out along with everything else.”
“Who’s keeping overall track of things?”
“E.C. Tally. That kind of job was made for him. He knows to the gram the mass of everything being thrown away, and he provides a running total anytime you ask for it—or even if you don’t.”
“How close are we to a decision, Teri? I’ve been too busy even to ask.”
“Asking won’t help. Tally says he doesn’t know. Nenda and Rebka do, and maybe Julian Graves. They know all the facts. But not one of them is telling. My guess is that we still have a long way to go, because internal fixtures are bring thrown away faster than ever.”
A fat disk, three meters across and half a meter thick, went spinning away through the air from an upper level of the ship. It flew thirty or forty meters before it plowed sideways into deep snow.
Teri said, “I think that’s Louis Nenda’s special luxury bed. The only one aboard who could throw it like that is Archimedes. I wonder where Nenda will sleep now?”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s his top priority. Nobody should plan much sleep anywhere for the next day or two.” Torran glanced up at the sun. “Uh-oh. I had no idea it was so late. It will be sunset in another hour. We have to get back to work.”
“I can’t believe it’s so close to sundown.” Teri looked to the readout in her suit’s faceplate. “And my suit agrees with the way I feel. It says we have four hours and more before dark.”
“That’s strange.” Torran paused again in his work. “My suit is saying the same thing as yours. But our eyes aren’t lying, either.”
They stared at the sun, barely above the horizon, then turned to look at each other.
At last Teri said, “I have no idea what is going on.”
“Nor do I. But this is strange enough, whatever it is, we have to report it this minute.”
&
nbsp; * * *
Teri Dahl was right. They did indeed have a long way to go. But she was wrong in thinking that Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka knew how far.
“We’re not down to the wire yet, nowhere near it. There’s loads more stuff can go.” Nenda was in the conference room with Hans Rebka, along with E.C. Tally, Julian Graves, Darya Lang, and Atvar H’sial. Nenda’s beloved conference table had long since vanished, torn apart by Archimedes and thrown outside. The chairs had suffered the same fate. The members of the group sat around on the floor.
Nenda went on, “One thing’s for sure, if we have a chance at all, it’s a slim one. I pulled us together because we need to make a couple of decisions. Tally, what we got up to now?”
“In our present situation, we have no chance whatsoever of achieving orbit.”
“That’s just lovely. What I had in mind was a bit more detail. Like, maybe, a few numbers, a few facts, some probabilities.”
“Those I will gladly provide.”
“But not too many of ’em.”
“Can there be too many facts? However, let us begin with fundamentals. In order to reach a Bose entry node in this system, the Have-It-All must achieve escape velocity from Marglot. We must somehow attain with our drive a final velocity of better than 9.43 kilometers a second. Based on the Have-It-All’s present mass, and assuming a drive efficiency of thirty-eight percent, which appears to be the best that we can hope for, our top final velocity would be 7.61 kilometers a second.”
“So we’re not even close. Not even close to close. You’re tellin’ us we somehow have to get rid of twenty percent of the ship’s original mass.”
“Nineteen point three percent, to be more precise. However, considerable mass reduction is still possible. We have scarcely begun to remove the second class of inessentials.” Tally glanced around the conference room. “For example, wall paneling such as that. It is not needed for flight. It must go.”
“That paneling is special hardwoods from Kleindienst. I’ll never be able to replace it. Go on.”
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